Hannes Naudé took advantage of a funky feature of MATLAB’s REGEXP in order to sneak a command by our security. Dynamic regular expressions allow you to execute MATLAB commands from within a regular expression, an unusual feature that’s been useful to me in the past when doing replacements. Embarrassingly, we weren’t even trying to block CLEAR because it didn’t matter in past contests. REGEXP and CLEAR are now blocked. No real damage to the contest was done and we’re still on-track to award a Midnight Madness prize tonight to the best-scoring entry submitted before midnight EST.
It is fun to participate in the Matlab programming contest